December 14, 2009

On the launchpad

Woo-hoo! We submitted our App to Apple today! It’s so weird — until we submitted it, the App didn’t feel real, but now it does. I don’t know how long until it hits the App store. Chances are we’ll have a bit of back and forth with Apple as it gets approved, but the App is done!!! Now on to make a video of the App in action so that people can get a sense of what it is.

We call the App Taskee. We’ve done a few interesting things with it, for our first App. It’s a to-do list app. We added a few features to make it sweet, and a few that we’ll add in the future if the App sells enough copies. Building an App as a team is a surprisingly tough at small scale. I’m used to large-scale app development( and I mean large scale as in millions of lines of code scattered across thousands of developers… ), and at small scale, every detail is yours to deal with. In some sense, it’s very freeing. In others, it’s tougher than I’d like. The biggest challenge is that your willpower is the main force behind getting things done. In large scale, you can create an action plan and measures, and get leads to help keep things moving. In small scale, you are all keeping things moving. If I have other things to take care of — a Doctor’s appointment, a Midterm, etc, then the App development will grind to a halt.

The other big challenge — at large scale, you have tons of ideas coming from all directions to work with, the challenge being keeping the cats herded. At small scale, you have few cats to herd, but little/no market research. Your market research method is, “Build it and see if they come”. Small scale is a lottery ticket. Large scale, you can play until you win.